Understandably people don't like Bending Spoons - they fired the whole dev team on Evernote, and the price has gone way up too.. but as a user I have to say Evernote the product has gotten better and better since the acquisition. They've improved performance and have great new features every month.
> Understandably people don't like Bending Spoons
I have no reason to believe they are nice guys, but I also don't have the opposite. But it's interesting to me by default you think they are in the wrong.
Supposedly the people that hired all those employees didn't know what they were doing and mismanaged the company all the way to needing to sell. Why are the bad guys the ones that actually are willing to do the hard work of making the product profitable so that it can keep existing?
The fault should be with the previous owners that drove it to the ground leaving no more options, not bending spoons, imo. If it was well managed it wouldn't need to be sold.
- VC funny money creating illusion of jobs for a bit = I sleep
- Turning it into a real money engine that can sustain the product for years = real shit
> by default you think they are in the wrong.
They are an acquisition company fueled almost solely by VC loans. They want big returns, you don't get those from normal business, but you do from squeezing the life out of something.
> they fired the whole dev team on Evernote, and the price has gone way up too.. but as a user I have to say Evernote the product has gotten better and better since the acquisition
I'd say it's only just slightly improved now, with a few bugs fixed and features improved. Not at all worth the price increase.
And it was horrible for a good 6 months after the acquisition... Some days I could not login to the website for several hours. Images in some notes wouldn't load some days. Searches would be missing results. Bug reports sat idle for a couple months before someone would respond asking for more info.
The fact that Evernote even still exists suggest Bending Spoons has done something right
They've kept the product alive but I don't know that it's terribly improved... I've been a paid user since 2008. Switching would be painful for me given how familiar I am with it but I came close this last year when it stopped letting me stay logged in on multiple Mac computers at the same time...
I was with Evernote since 07, and found it a doddle to ditch. Export the lot, bring into Apple Notes or Bear. Or a combination of the two. Sorted.
Sounds like you've already moved on from it, but if people are looking for a pretty seamless Evernote replacement, Joplin (open source) is pretty much an exact replica of Evernote and can import Evernote data.
The annoyance I have when considering a move away from Evernote is that none of the recommended alternatives have IFTTT support.
(Although having said that, I do drop most of my notes into iOS/macOS Drafts these days which also doesn't have IFTTT support. But I could probably lash something up with webhooks and SQLite if absolutely necessary.)
Is there an option to export in Evernote?
From what i remember they did the same at wetransfer. Doubling pricings without notification.
Wow, that's interesting.
I was a very early Evernote (paid) user. But they lost their way sometime after they became a unicorn, so I bailed out.
I had assumed, since they were bought, that it was just a way to squeeze money from existing users. I had no idea they were actually improving things.
I stopped using Evernote actively after they reduced a formatting bug for their exported notes from Important to Wishlist and then sold to Bending Spoons.
Bending Spoons not only fixed that particular bug, but added a lot of useful features from other tools like "Block based editing" from Notion.
They are actively improving the product in every way, and they record short monthly recap videos to talk about the improvements. They didn't milk and kill the product. It's an interesting watch.
For me, the ship has sailed unfortunately. I divided that Evernote corpus into two, and personal parts went to Notion and technical part carried to Obsidian, and converted to a digital garden.
I have no hard feelings for them, though. I wish them the best of luck.
I get the attraction of all these various online apps where you're supposed to be able to store everything in one place. But they're single points of failure. In spite of the downsides, I just use text notes and take pics of, e.g., conference slides, on my phone. But, honestly, I don't really refer back to the vast majority of that stuff anyway.
I like Evernote but it just isn’t worth $130 / year for me. Last year they had a sale for $50 (or was it $60) for a year and I paid for that. If I can’t renew at that I’ll have to figure out how to migrate to Obsidian.
Migrating to Obsidian looks to be very easy now: https://help.obsidian.md/import/evernote
When I converted many years ago it required 3rd party tools and was slightly more involved (but still totally worth it).
Two things I suspect I'll miss from Evernote is their web clipper and their OCR.
Last time I tried the Obsidian web clipper, it was pretty rough. It would drop images or include ads. I found the Evernote clipper to be pretty much flawless.
Evernote's OCR capabilities are also great. Somehow it's able to do a better job of recognizing my handwriting than even I can do sometimes. Last I checked, Obsidian isn't very good at this which is strange because the two big platforms — Windows and MacOS — both have excellent OCR APIs they could use for free.
Wait a sec — you're saying you'll take the time and trouble to "... figure out how to migrate to Obsidian" rather than pay the $70-$80 renewal premium over what you paid last year? Let's do a thought experiment. Suppose you spend a total of 3 hours from start to finish doing the migration. That's the equivalent of being paid $25/hour in lieu of paying the Evernote full price renewal as opposed to what you paid on sale last year. I have a feeling you would not consider that close to being what your time is worth nor to what you're paid in your day job.
You might be surprised to know that I also mow my lawn, I clean home, I cook sometimes, I do laundry, I drive myself to work, and I sometimes even watch TV, spend time on HN, or play video games.
Aside from the fact that such calculations aren't necessarily applicable anyway, it is incorrect because they would most likely have continued to use and have to pay for Evernote for more than just the one year.
I'm trying to imagine a product manager calling me to say, "Hi, we just bought this product you use, we're raising prices and firing the dev team. But hahahaha, you can't quit us, I have a spreadsheet here that says your time escaping our clutches will cost you more than paying the extortion fee to cover us buying the tool and the profit we need. Tough luck, but you have no logical alternative."
I'm not sure that my relationship with tools is so bloodless that it is only driven by dollars, cents, and minutes. I'm not sure I have to clench my teeth and write that product manager a cheque.
Have you ever tried Obsidian? I feel like it's capable of replacing the entire family of note and knowledge management apps.
I actively use Obsidian and Notion.
Obsidian is very good for technical and static knowledge bases. I use their publish feature for my digital garden. Having local markdown files and working on them is great. Obsidian is basically a secret sauce over markdown file format.
On the other hand, dynamic content lives much better in Notion. Databases, formulae, interconnection between other services etc. makes it a great project management tool for my life. However, due to the file format and everything can be interconnected forms both a walled garden and moat at the same time.
Both serve different niches and work very differently. So neither one is a silver bullet by themselves for all scenarios.
But Obsidian is a great knowledge management tool if used right, that's true.
Yes they have finally fixed some performance issues and that is a huge win
My guess is that's indicative of the price Bending Spoons paid - they get a positive return on investment if they collect existing subscription revenue, and do a bit of work which keeps the existing userbase happy.
Under the previous ownership, the gap between Evernote's valuation (ie what investors had put in) and revenue (what investors would getting back) was so great that just surviving wasn't a strategy; the business could only value the existing userbase and product as a starting point for building a much larger userbase. That's a path to enshittification.